This is an updated version of an article first published in August 2026 Kimi Antonelli was 10 when his father Marco first realised the boy sitting on his lap, operating the steering and gears, might have an exceptional talent as a racing driver.

The pair were at the Adria circuit in north-east Italy, Marco with his Lamborghini sports car team, Kimi competing in a karting race. It was the end of the day and Marco, a former driver himself, asked his son: "Do you want to try the Lamborghini?"

Marco strapped himself and Kimi into the car, belts extended around both. Dad was in charge of the throttle and brake, his son would control the rest. "I couldn't see the track because he was in front of me with a helmet on," Marco tells BBC Sport.

"I could only see beside me the marker panels before each corner - 100m, 50m. "We started to drive, step by step, faster, faster, faster. In the end, I pushed like I was alone and I arrived at the braking point at the end of the straight, 320km/h, braked very hard and at the limit. "The car had a lot of oversteer.

Kimi controlled the oversteer perfectly, then I went on the throttle, Kimi finished the oversteer, changed gear, and went. "I said: 'OK, stop, because it has now become dangerous.' But when I saw the video, 10 years old, on my leg, oversteer, everything perfect, I said: 'Maybe he has something special.'"

And now Kimi, who turned 20 only in August, has dominated F1 in only his second season, and become the youngest world champion in the sport's history. This is the story of a boy his dad says was "born in a garage".

"Kimi from 15 days old was in the garage and heard the sound of the engine and the smell of the exhaust," says Marco, who worked with his wife Veronica on their racing team business.

It was the Christmas holidays when Kimi was about three, and Marco had brought home a simulator he had bought for his guests to try out at the Bologna Motor Show. "Each evening, Kimi wanted to drive," Marco remembers.

Just like seven years later in the Lamborghini, Kimi would sit on Marco's leg, the controls divided in the same way. "I remember one night I started to fall asleep because I had been at work very early and we had a crash because I didn't brake when we arrived at the end of the straight," Marco says.

"And Kimi said: 'Dad, dad, no sleep, no sleep. I have to drive.'" Marco Antonelli did not originally want his son to become a racing driver, because of his own struggles during his career. "Sometimes you are fast but not in the right position to become a professional driver," he says.

In the 1990s, Marco Antonelli was on the cusp of becoming a works driver in the DTM touring car series, then a huge hit with audiences across Europe. He tested for Alfa Romeo, but then the team boss left and the opportunity evaporated.

Another chance came up with BMW, alongside Roberto Ravaglia and Steve Soper - stars at the time. Again, the same thing happened. "I suffered a lot for it," Marco says. "And, of course, I was scared that my son [would] relive the same situation.

At the beginning, I was very stressed about the passion my son had for motorsport." Kimi tried a go-kart for the first time when he was five, and immediately showed an awareness of racing lines, braking points and car control. The Antonellis were what Marco describes as "a normal family".

They could not possibly afford to pay for Kimi to take part in all the categories on the way to Formula 1. Marco decided he could fund Kimi through karting and a year of the basic single-seater category, Formula 4.

After that, he figured he might be able to put him in one of his GT cars and become professional that way. But Kimi immediately started to impress. Whatever category he entered, he was quick, and won. By the time Kimi was 11, his name was buzzing around motor racing circles.

Mercedes heard about him, and their driver academy scout Gwen Lagrue flew to Italy to check him out. It was a season in which Antonelli had ended up driving a kart with less power than those of his rivals.

Marco had told Kimi this would be good for him - he should think not about the result, but about how to improve, always push hard. "Gwen was impressed about this condition of power and driving in this category that Kimi did," Marco says. "And maybe they understood that Kimi was a different child."

Now Kimi was a member of the Mercedes driver academy, Marco could stop worrying about money, and start focusing on helping his son achieve his full potential. Mercedes were not the only big names in F1 who had noticed Antonelli's promise.

"When he was in karting, you could already see he was one of the stand-out talents," says four-time world champion Max Verstappen, the only other teenager to win an F1 race. At 15, Antonelli was ready to move up to cars, and, as a final preparation, did a couple of races in a karting category with gears.

On his debut, with minimal pre-event testing, he took pole position. After that, he went to the world final, and stuck it on pole again. This was the end of 2021, after which Antonelli moved full-time into cars.

Through 2022, he swept the board in various championships in Formula 4, and the same happened in Formula Regional in 2023. By now, Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff was already thinking that Antonelli would be his next F1 driver, potentially a replacement for Lewis Hamilton.

With the seven-time champion approaching 40, Wolff was planning on taking control of that generational transition. So when it came time to negotiate a new contract with Hamilton in 2023, Wolff played hardball. Hamilton wanted to sign for at least two firm years, Wolff only one.

In the end, they compromised on a contract for 2024 with an option for 2025. Hamilton, unimpressed, decided to look at his options, and signed to join Ferrari in 2025, telling Wolff in late January 2024, before the start of that season. Wolff immediately phoned Marco Antonelli, to tell him the "very big news".

"'We put Kimi in Formula 1,'" Marco remembers Wolff saying. "'What do you think?' "I said: 'Oh, [it] is a difficult question you ask me. Of course I'm happy that you think about Kimi but are you sure he's ready?'" Mercedes were at a management away day.

Wolff called his senior engineers together to tell them about Hamilton's decision. "We were reviewing options and trying to come to a fairly rapid conclusion," says trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin. "We were all keen to just go with Kimi, which we knew was a bit of a risk.

But it was quite exciting and we thought, based on his career to date, he had a good chance of being very good. It seemed like a good challenge." Antonelli had not even driven an F1 car when Wolff made the call.

Mercedes put together a testing programme for him, 20-odd days in cars a couple of years old at tracks all over the world to prepare him for his F1 debut in 2025. Shovlin and the engineers were immediately impressed. "It was how rapidly he would get up to speed," Shovlin says.

"What you normally see with drivers is they're just incrementally going a little bit quicker, braking a bit later. "If you compare with other drivers we've seen in an F1 car for the first time, the best I'd ever seen until then was George [Russell]. You suddenly saw someone who was quite similar.

"With Kimi, he took a couple of runs to work out how the car behaved and then he'd be more or less on the limit. "The other thing you can see is the fidelity of the car control, how they can sit with it right on the edge of breaking away from them on entry to a corner, but they can just control it in that condition.

"Equally, when you looked at the mistakes he was making, they were often errors of judgement or lack of experience. They weren't run-out-of-talent mistakes." Antonelli made one of these at the 2024 Italian Grand Prix.

Wolff decided to give him his first experience of an F1 weekend in first practice at his home race at Monza. It was a spectacula